The Politics of Attack: Communiqués and Insurrectionary Violence

by Michael Loadenthal

This study is an exploration of insurrectionary anarchist praxis, with a particular focus on how the rhetoric, discourse, and theory is both informed and conveyed through communiqués.

It challenges the reader to consider the marginalized ideas put forth by those political actors that communicate through bombs, arson, and broken windows, who are rejected through the state's construction of "terrorism". When a police station is firebombed, the subsequent discussions focus more on the illegality of the act rather than the sociopolitical critique the actor put forth.

What if we were to embrace the means through which the militant 'organic intellectual' acts, and consider the communiqué's content, the way one would consider any political text? This inter-textual analysis is presented within a political and historical context, with the hopes of elevating the discussion of insurrectionary praxis beyond notions of terrorism and securitization and towards its application for intersectional challenges to structural violence and domination.

In the social war being waged by insurrectionary anarchists, small acts of violence are announced and contextualized through written communiqués, which are posted online, translated, and circulated globally. This book offers the first contemporary history of these post-millennial, digitally-mediated, insurrectionary anarchist networks, and seeks to locate this tendency within anti-state struggles from the past. Through an examination of thousands of movement documents, this book presents the discourse offered by clandestine, urban guerrillas fighting capitalism, the state, and the omnipresent forces of violence and coercion.

Genres: Politics

272 pages, Hardcover

Published July 25, 2017

Reviews

[Jacob Libby · Rating 5 out of 5]

Michael Loadenthal is a Georgetown graduate with USAID ties. As a self-ascribed participant-researcher of "insurrectionary anarchist violence," Loadenthal's book steps to the razor's edge of directly advocating outright terrorist violence.

Rejecting the future plans for eminent attack in the present, hoping nebulously that "attacks lead to more attacks, which in some way lead to structural change," the insurrectionary anarchist (whose movement Loadenthal participates in and supports), engages in a "totalized war in which all beings are emancipated from all forms of domination."

How is this achieved? Through the "logic of material damage": riots, road blockades, strikes, gang violence, the creation of ungovernable zones, building occupations, arson, explosives, graffiti, vandalism, mail bombs, clashes with security officers . . . That is, "insurrectionary action as a form of warfare."

And what sorts of "direct actions" is Loadenfeld imagining? Here are some examples: Letter bombs, book bombs, improvised exclusive devices, timed incendiary devices, shootings, kneecapping.

Loadenthal tells us . . .

1. He is a member of insurrectionary anarchist networks,
2. He hopes his work will advance the illegal activities of these groups,
3. He has had to take care not to reveal to his sources amongst these networks
4. His job as a researcher is to support the development of transformative strategies

And in this book, Loadenthal asks whether terrorism can have an emancipatory function.

Wow.

[Rui Coelho · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author, an academic and professional organizer, demonstrates a superficial knowledge of the subject.
Chapter 6 is the most interesting.

[Mills College Library]

335.83 L7957 2017